Open to the abysmal
character, Kora,
to the crevice between skeletal ribs.

At the limit of reason, intuition. Already possessed
by the mass? But no -- attained without reaching
the summit first.
And why is it necessary?
Needed to properly give thanks,
else like a child;
receiving without knowing,
innocence without wisdom,
unable to truly return
the gift.

Jumping over one's
own shadow:
"Ego sum qui sum"

Sound of small waves
Prows cutting through water

Go to the Dogana point
Bring yer own bottle,
sit, drink and write
sense or nonsense,
Anything that rushes out.
Invoke the masters
without fear of pretension, in an
attempt to make it sing again,
ringing off the rim of
the bathtub.

For one evening me and
my wine hold the
responsibility of keeping
the city afloat.Wager with the adversary.
Marco Polo to Dadu to
do business with the Khan.
Geologic ages compressed
into seconds.

Wine for cigar exchange
and now a small torch
between my fingers.

The incarnation must beheld in the body and in the mind,in the senses and in thebreath

Medium of star shine
and street grime.

The guerilla always puffs
a cigar while on a jungle romp.The edifice of the land.
Ash tapped in the crevice
of the pier stones. Phenomenology is a metallurgy.

Quick puff succession.
Forgetting vowels,
the breath between stops, impasse and the overcoming of impasse, ongoing con-spiracy between God and Man.

A mad swamp of incomprehension,
tension, and then words graced
from somewhere above. At this milieu, at this
middle, something
sparks, smoke is produced,
the world is fashioned,breath, anima, ruah.
Smoke drifts across
the sparkling water,
a line of lights,
vaporous curl of letters.

"As one that would draw thru the node of things"

Cigar a baobab of ash.
Toes free.
Only the stars remain firm and clear.
Not even these --
a flicker of the death of Heaven,
like the improvisation
of music, forced amnesia,
a terrible disease that
has no name.

Floating on the azure air...

Jubilee must be conscious,
elegies of discarded empire,
ignored accordions in the
plaza, body as the intersection ofthe physical and spiritual worlds.

The Calypso was the first ship I spotted;
stranded on an island of seduction.

Christ changed the nature of category itself.

Thurn und Taxis

Mars to my right,
Venus already below the
horizon and behind me,
Neptune, on porpoise-back, straight ahead,
rising and blessing from the sea.

Interface of light, of water, of sound, of blood, of wine. The door was open and we rushed to the event.

Committing the only sin
of letting a single breath pass
unawares.

There is no space thatneeds completion,every detail is alreadydrawn in.

Even this solid rock is sinking.

The deity moves
through love, everyone incomparable, neighbour encounteredin the rupture of myself.
Respirating, perceiving. Not a hole in this world.
Fragmented, distorted,
risk, paradox, ambivalence, precarious.Philosophy must trace the mystery which precedes being.

Thursday, August 30, 2018

Magma flow, glaciation, cellular mitosis, species extinction, tribal federations, the founding of cities, imperial overreach, the inscription of epics. Interpenetrating processes, differing in rate, rhythm and tone, converging on a single individual, a single town, a single planet. An intersection of geology and psychology on main street in a luminous flash of conception, then branching out, retreating down the back alleys.

Yet none of these sequences advancing blindly. Each possessing a sort of wisdom, a wariness, an archaic animation, a god in a mask. Bound by no moral code, they revel with Dionysus; haunted, intoxicated, tearing flesh, ripping limbs, naked in the sunlight; creeping vines, braying jungle cats, praising, overwhelmed. An ecstatic chorus older than the bedrock.

As the ancient song bubbled up opposite Regent’s Park Tube Station, still the earth seemed green and flowery; still, though it issued from so rude a mouth, a mere hole in the earth, muddy too, matted with root fibres and tangled grasses, still the old bubbling burbling song, soaking through the knotted roots of infinite ages, and skeletons and treasure, streamed away in rivulets over the pavement and all along the Marylebone Road, and down towards Euston, fertilising leaving a damp stain.

-- Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

Music is the original expression of chthonic creation, all other arts extending from it. It plays and rills and riffs not in imitation of the Forms, but as immediate presentation of them, as if mocking their supposed primacy. Its courses flow through the elements; through media of water, flame, channels of sap and marrow, verse, cold architectures of steel and glass. Bubbling still -- right now -- in the imperial metropoles. A beggar woman, a hag perched on the fence pole, a creature of the street, takes up the chant; vessel of ALP, spring of the Goddess, the passing voice of life itself.

The universe is a continuous medley of mental processes, or a single huge mind with different levels of activity going on in it at once. As awareness descends through these levels, it produces ever more thoughts so that the lower reaches of the mind are noisy and full of chaotic and disharmonious impulses bound together only by the illusory chain of causality; as it reascends, it produces at each higher level fewer, less object-oriented and fragmented thoughts, up to the objectless contemplation of the One.

-- The Shape of Ancient Thought, Thomas McEvilley

And yet her song becomes distant, its tune indistinct, its words unclear, its listeners few. The song gets reduced to a concept. “Gets reduced,” but that is not how it was viewed by the wise of that era. Instead, it was “purified,” made transcendent, stripped of its contamination by the physical, the feminine, the animal, the non-intelligible, expression in time.

Crystalline, star-like abstraction. Mathematical purity, the suppression of dissonance, categories fixed, the notes unbending, a hierarchical gradation to absolute Spirit. A vast and austere beauty, eternal and perfect, free from the fluctuation and decomposition of phenomenon. All is a product of mind. The One is without objects, without any contact with Nature which at best is viewed as being an imperfect copy of Spirit, and at worst something wholly Evil.

Superficially seen, Plato was a playful dialectician, but deeply understood, he was an extremely religious man. In a certain sense, Platonic philosophy is in its essence a powerful synthesis of Greek shamanistic beliefs that have been systematized and spiritualized.

-- Out of This World, I.P. Couliano

Several steps separate the Dionysian from the Platonic, the shamanic being one of these. The Apollonian healers and seers, the iatromantis figures like Aristeaus and Abaris, translated or responded to general Dionysian ecstasy by shaping it into something individual and internal.

This course is reflected in Plato’s own life. Before becoming a disciple of Socrates, he was of a religious nature. He wrote tragic poetry which he burned after being initiated by his master, and later banished the poets from his ideal Republic. The archaic Dionysian, Orphic and shamanic musical vision of the unity of being/becoming was made intelligible, bound under the category of Reason.

And we may add that the Pseudo-Dionysius, whose works were the source of mediaeval Christian mysticism, and were held in great reverence by Thomas Aquinas, Tauler and Meister Eckhart, were copied from the order of the divine hierarchies as set forth by Plotinus, Jamblichus, and Proclus, who all, through Plato and Pythagoras, based themselves on Orpheus.

-- Orpheus, G.R.S. Mead

In this way, the original song of the Orphic book of nature was not entirely silenced. Its notes were transformed into text, its poetry had mostly become prosaic and rationalized, but its call could no more be stifled than starlight be extinguished. A mystical tradition persisted, at times meeting in secrecy and at times in open and honoured acceptance by the reigning religious and secular authorities. It largely ignored divisions of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, of religious and political affiliations. Mystics of all lands and creeds were united by vision.

There had been, within this broad tradition, a movement away from the total affirmation of the processes of life, a progress of emphasis on the embrace of Matter to the goal of the apprehension of pure Spirit, but certain seers (like Iamblichus/Jamblichus and others) were still able to catch glimpses of the primal ecstasy. Even in the writings of the most orthodox of these spiritual seekers, Thomas Aquinas most notably, the old inspired chorus can still be heard.

At times I even feel moved to address all future prophets of mankind as follows: “Prophets! Dear, kind prophets! Leave us alone. Do not try to fan the flames of lofty sentiments in our souls; do not try to make us better than we are. For so long as we are bad, we limit ourselves to petty felonies; as we grow better, we kill.

“Try to understand, dear prophets, that it is neither perfidy nor cunning nor vice that forces us to rage like vengeful animals; it is our inborn feelings of humanity and justice: without nobility of the soul we should never know righteous indignation. And try to understand that our souls work like swings: the stronger the push up towards the nobility of the soul, the stronger the swoop down towards the fury of the beast...”

-- Novel with Cocaine, M. Ageyev

The emphasis on spiritual purity and moral uprightness has taken its toll. Much of the nightmare of history during the last millennium emanates from fanatical responses to the words of the prophets of the pure: Nature has indeed fallen and with it the nature of man, but it can be made good and holy once more.

Crusades, inquisitions, witch hunts, religious wars, colonialism, genocide, racial supremacy, revolutionary reigns of terror, reactionary counter-suppression, totalitarian ideologies, scientific single vision, technological eschatology, commercial omnipresence all stem from the desire -- not wrong in itself -- for Truth without error and change, and for Spirit (however codified or designated) free of all impurity. But this leads to a split in the soul. What is whole is not necessarily perfect.

And so the soul swings, as it were, from nobility to the fury of that which is sub-bestial, monstrous, Satanic.

“...Up to now I have spoken only of local Satanic associations, but there are others, more extensive, which ravage the old world and the new, for Diabolism is quite up to date in one respect. It is highly centralized and very capably administered. There are committees, subcommittees, a sort of curia, which rules America and Europe, like the curia of a pope.

“The biggest of these societies founded as long ago as 1855 is the society of the Re-Theurgistes Optimates. Beneath an apparent unity it is divided into two camps, one aspiring to destroy the universe and reign over the ruins, the other thinking simply of imposing upon the world a demoniac cult of which it shall be high priest...”

-- Là-Bas, J.K. Huysmans

The satanic perfectly mirrors the orthodox. Both exist as highly centralized hierarchies, each held in thrall by their own dogma which divides the cosmos into categories of the accepted and the unaccepted. They are virtually indistinguishable.

Agents, double agents, triple and quadruple agents, flip back and forth across the border, employing identical methods and means, blurring the lines, provoking schisms, making words imprecise and ideas incoherent. Tradition and counter-tradition each calling the other black, a willingness on both sides to both conquer and destroy the world, each guilty of atrocity upon atrocity.

Was not everything, after all, like this bewildering woodland, this dance of dark and light? Everything only a glimpse always unforeseen, and always forgotten. For Gabriel Syme had found in the heart of the sun-splashed wood what many modern painters had found there. He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for the final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.

-- The Man Who was Thursday, G.K. Chesterton

Chesterton’s perceptive novel tells the tale of an anarchist terrorist cell that is wholly infiltrated by and composed of police agents, each convinced that the others are genuine violent revolutionaries. All anarchist violence is really state violence, all state violence is really anarchist violence. Shadow and sunlight, evil and good, can no longer be separated. All comes into question.

There is only the impressionistic dance of light and darkness -- only a play or a mirage, without bottom or foundation, universal nausea. A sort of chaotic music returns, the maenads reassemble, but there is no acceptance of the frenzy. Most try not to listen, stuff their ears against the siren song, but a few -- mainly unstable, outcast -- begin to be caught up in the dance.

“Purpose of life is unknown, and hence way to be is hidden from the eyes of living critters. Who can say if perhaps the schizophrenics are not correct? Mister, they take a brave journey. They turn from mere things, which one may handle and turn to practical use; they turn inward to meaning. There, the black-night-without-bottom lies, the pit. Who can say if they will return? And if so, what will they be like, having glimpsed meaning? I admire them.”

-- Martian Time-Slip, Philip K. Dick

It makes sense that it would be the “mad” who would first make the plunge. They have the least to lose -- already shunned and sidelined by the civilization of light -- and they have made a commitment, or have been by circumstances forced, to rediscover meaning. This meaning can no longer be universal and consensual -- everyone has become a skeptic -- but instead is particular, fluctuating, ad hoc.

Here alone -- with the mad, the drug user, the ignored artist, the socially despised -- is there the willingness to dive into the abyss and to attempt to surface with some answers from among the confused kaleidoscope of worldviews. Most do not reemerge. They attempt a sort of shamanism, but with total lack of support from their society, their would-be tribe.

The song is rediscovered, though there is the lingering drive to make sense of it. Even for the schizophrenic a rational -- in their own eyes -- grid must be overlaid upon the tumult of nature. And in this attempt to make rational sense, to privilege the abstractions of mind over completed embodied and ensouled experience, they suffer, they drown.

The prima materia of poetic emotion is a synesthetic chaos. A confused mixture of diverse emotions is first felt painfully in the body, like a swarming of multiple lives trying to escape. It is usually that uncomfortable feeling that forces the poet to take up the pen, be it as a vague and imperious need to exteriorize himself or in a less coarse fashion.

-- “Clavicles for a Great Poetic Game,” René Damaul

But for the very few that accept this synesthetic chaos in its own terms, in Her own terms, they may be blessed with creative enchantment. True poetry springs from this well, human imagination is found again, but not in concepts or ideals, not in anything that can be limited to the intelligible, but in the senses and emotions, in swarming life and in physical touch and beauty.

The eternal shines in the particular, the timeless in time, and all within the riotous details of perception. We return to the processes of the Earth, and to the inner processes of imagining and perceiving, and the bonfires are lit again. Prose becomes poetry, poetry song, and song is coupled with dance.

Saturday, June 16, 2018

(This piece was written for inclusion in a coming art exhibit by Dennis Koch. The exhibition will open in Los Angeles on 6/23, and will also feature the Crypto-Kubrology research of Alex Fulton.)

It was Blake who prophesied that the senses would once again combine and permeate the entire surface of the body. No longer would seeing, hearing, smelling and tasting be isolated to the head but would, like the sense of touch and synergized with it, be coextensive with the skin.

This would not mean, however, that the skin would be covered with tiny eyes, ears, nostrils and tongues, but that it would be radically transformed into a synesthetic sensory medium in which one blended super-sense would perceive with the whole body -- ubiquitously and omnidirectionally -- all possible sensory data; at once an ever-changing kaleidocosm of blended colours, sounds, smells, tastes, textures and emotions.

This synesthesia of enhanced touch, which Marshall McLuhan may have ultimately meant by the haptic, is not, according to Blake, an exotic and unrealizable fantasy, but is in fact the birthright of our physical form. This is the true nature of the human body: created in the image of God before the Fall.

Nor was the body meant to be isolated -- male and female He created them. The body was made for communication, copulation, procreation, subsequent creation. All-sensing skin in blessed union with all-sensing skin. An unending shower of perceptual grace, in no way confined to what are now called the organs of reproduction or the genitalia, in every way exceeding or transcending the sexual. The same power that fires the Sun is generated by this coupling. And, as taught D.H. Lawrence, it is this power of life which causes the Sun to burn and not the opposite. It is the apotheosis of the making of love.

This urge, this snaking and riverine intensity, flows up from the lower extremities of the body, absorbed by channels of marrow and blood and breath, rising and recombining at various confluences, gathering at the heart -- “the cardiac synthesizer” -- where it is churned alchemically into pure imagination, spiraling up to the brain and beyond and then descending in circuit through contact of skin with skin. Perfected perception of the one in total sensory awareness of the perfected perception of the other. Instant manifestation of all percepts/concepts (there being no distinction between the two) as something indistinguishable from both imagination and love.

McKenna spoke of telepathic cephalopods -- octopuses and other marine animals -- who communicate through the rippling and gyrating of patterned colours and lights on the surface of their bodies. Meaning is not something to be heard in communication with other individuals of one’s own species but beheld. And the same could also be true for our prelapsarian forms; not only perceiving and receiving but also emitting and transmitting dancing lights, colours, sounds and fragrances. Communication as sensual synesthetic simultaneity.

Here, McKenna is less anthropocentric, less biblically oriented, than Blake, although he is much more concerned with being considered “scientific.” Blake could care less about literal and scientific “facts.” A thing is true if it is affirmed by poetic vision. In such a vision, the unified sensorium is reflecting upon itself. But, as in McKenna’s thought, there is no need to limit this to the human and still less to any one particular human story. Nature in each of her ever-transforming aspects consists of a myriad of organs of perception, each perceiving the other in a nearly infinite variety of designs and forms. And as human perception has fallen -- the senses isolated from one another -- one sense, notably sight, dominates the rest.

Yet what is the Fall? What characterizes it? The Bible explains that it was brought about by sin, but that only begs the further question -- what is sin? Nietzsche’s answer is most lucid: sin is separation. Separation of the senses from each other. Separation of human beings from the rest of nature. Separation of reason from desire. Separation of male from female. Separation of Man from God. Separation of subject from object, of self from other, of figure from ground, of mind from bodies, of bodies from their crafted extensions.

And of these extensions language itself is most important, being the scaffolding of all subsequent technology. After the Fall -- and it matters little if this is expressed in mythological, psychological or biological terms, each of these being merely different stories within language -- language became split off from the things that it referred to. In effect, language as we have always known it and can presently conceive of it was born at this point.

But in all of the ancient and archaic stories -- depicting in verse language’s own longing to cross the river Lethe and behold its real nature -- every Fall is followed by an eventual Redemption. Language will be redeemed. History will be redeemed. Nature will be redeemed. The senses will be redeemed. The multiform kaleidoscopic protoplasmic sensorium will be cleansed and become radiant.

Within the Abrahamic religions, as in the progressive and evolutionary ideologies that spun off from these traditions, this moment of return is projected out into the future, into the “to come.” Yet time itself is a product of separation, of the Fall. Prior to the Fall there was no time. As the two terms, Fall and Redemption, are logically linked -- the one necessitating the other -- the existence of the Fall implies the existence of the Redemption. It will come. A timeless state has happened and a timeless state will happen again, and from the perspective of either, these two states are the same. For either, there really was no lapse into time. There was no Fall to begin with. In the timeless state -- sub specie aeternitatis -- nothing has fallen so there is no need for redemption.

The coming of Christ, His Incarnation, has already negated all of history. The Buddha’s awakening under the Bo tree accomplished the same. In fact, this mighty event occurs continually although it only really happens once. At every fraction of a second -- being a meaningless division of an illusory condition, time -- our perception paints a universe onto the void. Nature is perpetually incarnated. There is nothing to wake up to for we were never asleep. The perceived dreams and nightmares, and the cycles and patterns containing both, are all part of the mix.

Hell, purgatory and heaven are equally present, a fluid palimpsest of worlds and dimensions. All stories become true, each a branch or a twig of some living and breathing and breeding Orphic saga of existence. The elves are here, as are angels and demons, as are subatomic particles and wave functions, as are the gandharvas and the duende, plants and animals and fungi, each moving at different rates, each arising and passing, each supplying food and inspiration for the others. And each also non-existent for exactly the same reasons. None are complete in themselves. None are apart or autonomous. All sins have been forgiven long ago.

Already, then, the senses have been perfected and fused. The world of our perception -- the only world that we have access to -- is even now a sublime synesthesia. The psychedelic plants prove this. Consciousness is malleable. And the plants themselves are unnecessary. They, as with other techniques used to induce visionary experience, may tweak the mind into providing glimpses of the eternal, but it is a mistake to say that they, or even more reductively the chemicals contained in them, cause these experiences. They only remind us of what is already there.

Just as the body is not isolated from other bodies, there is no definite boundary to the mind. In his psychological studies, Jung could find no limit to the unconscious. Even to call it a collective unconscious is to mislead. For what is it a collectivity of? Eventually Jung identified it with the classical idea of the World Soul or the Anima Mundi, which both Yeats and Joyce referred to as the Great Memory. The Soul of the World, like each individual soul, is everything between the two impossible poles of pure matter and pure spirit.

The body, alive and sensing and also "collective" -- Albion and Finn and Adam Kadmon are all names of it -- is also synonymous with this. All of matter may make up this body, all of nature certainly. And the composition of the World Soul-Body is also language. The word made flesh, the flesh made of words, of verse. And this is what is seen in every sight, is heard in every sound. It is combined and projected "outwards" with every sensory experience.

The cycle of fall and redemption, a cycle found at every level of existence, is actually a cycle of forgetting and remembering afresh. The ancient art of memory, embedding the archaic systems of connection and correspondence which seethe in the heart of all magic, has for its end a general anamnesis, an awakening to the eternal.

The Muses being the daughters of Memory -- a fact of myth that Blake curiously disputed -- means that the cycle of the imagination itself, of image-making, of secondary creation, of perception as incarnation, is exactly this cycle. And to be more precise there are endless cycles within cycles, occurring at different speeds and seasons, eddies in the World Soul, at different stages of dreaming and waking, each perceiving the others, all perceiving the all. Media extending language extending breath extending wind extending starlight extending love extending the generation of haptic images in the heart.

Sunday, May 13, 2018

Formulating past broken nights of sanguine finabulators. Reckoning fish-weights accepting missives from embassies out past lawless half-breeds. Bleeding noses. Fell down from the beech tree. Ronny Totmann. Runny Titman. Did it to prove that I was lying when I said that it could never happen. It did happen. He made it happen. Sacrificed himself to devalue my word. What a turd. The toady of what’s-his-sneer. And then the even greater malignance of neighbour Adam. A singular event that stunted all growth. Tarnished all memories. Ass-stench and licorice-taste. Yet forgiven, perhaps, in a ceremony at the forest temple. Candy crushed. Howling. Demons devouring. Flies sucking blood. Full chod action. His skull pounded and buried at Golgotha. Washed by the blood...

General doubt. Cosmic Cartesian doubt, but without the rebirth. I think I am what? And that melts, decays, drifts away. Upon reflection no I is found. Yet there is reflection, perception, something flowing, something attempting to get a bead on...what? A flow spiraling around a flow. Poe’s maelstrom, the sudden flushed toilet of civilization. But in fact it is far more personal, more intimate, right under my nose, part of my breath. Breathing walls conjoined with disintegrating emotions, terrifying memories, armpit sweat, bad posture. And then flights of near-ecstasy, almost a calm, almost an eye in the storm, almost a foothold on truth. Then another stumble, another blow to confidence.

Fide. Faith. Fidel. Religion, ideology, science, fact, certainty, balance, reason, strength. All is vanity. And all this time I’m trying to suppress a fart. But then there’s that jasmine vine growing up and out from hell-knows-where among the banana trees with the promise that in May, for a couple of weeks with luck, there will be the fragrance of heaven on the breeze. And that beauty is also me/not-me.

Sartre and Huxley were both on mescaline, but one went to hell and the other went to heaven. Haunting giant crabs versus the corduroy slacks of the gods. The nausea, I think (but not am), is the more interesting of the two states. Seasickness on solid ground. Like the thousands of aftershocks which followed in the wake of 3/11. Another earthquake? Or is my inner-ear balance fucked? Or am I drunk again on this 400 yen Prince de Bao red wine that’s supposed to be a viable bulwark against radioactive strontium poisoning? Who says this? I don’t remember. Watch the street lights. Are they shaking or is that tremble coming from me? All is liquid, undulating. The only effective antidote against universal seasickness is to jump with a whoop into the sea and drown.

Drowning with panic is drowning with the illusion of self still intact. But give up. Observe motion without analysis or struggle. Acceptance. The undertow takes the offering and deposits it smoothly almost peacefully within a few strokes of the shore. Sputtering and hacking on the rocky sand, but senses still aware, still alive. Praising what? Who knows, but there is something to praise. A mysterious thing to rejoice that is beyond all doubt, that escapes doubt, not because it is me, but because doubt itself comes from the same place as the jasmine vines & the beech tree & earthquakes & nausea & tears & memories. When it blooms everything is in question except that its scent, nearly of decay, will also quietly fade into the wind and be lost for a while.

Sunday, April 1, 2018

Jumpstart: invoke OAM, kaggle waggle waggle, flop flop, ice in a
plastic cup, baritone moondance piano, finger drumming, smiles, paws,
beckoning, boring guitar solo, bus parking lot video, transformation
down in your soul, baby, German booms in the stairwell, rusted yellow
railing with cubic concret block stands, not German French, corner not
stairs, Waits? Nothing that good, red flag whitehawks on a tour, the
same chord over and over, canned drums, a side glance from the
fruit-slurping neighbour, Chip or Dale on her nails, can’t make sense of
the ratrace, now Italian? Feminine voices. A chair now occupied. Beard,
shaved sides. A whistle shrills. Sigh and a settle into heavy wooden
chairs, flowery maroon boulders, mix of English and Japanese, he’s full,
and some other tongue. Fingers tapping a plastic keyboard, like mine,
noe, misspelling, different stream of though, smaller in maroon and
flowers. Slightly weird. Cream parasol, black dress. Each to hir own
screen. LOCKER and the red arrow, taken again, grey fedora of soft
cloth, steady stream, always a new scene, white gloves crossed, now on
large plastic wheel, red cane, white masks, I’ll be waiting, striped
convexes, jazz slapping on the laptop keys, black plastic sun visor, a
yawn, a flake of eyebrow dandruff, shuffling, ahh..., tall red wooden
gate in the corner of the bus square, the Byrds? Up in the tree next to
the goat watering hole, mad on cactus, turn turn turn..., And a red
Turkish flag wrapped around the pole one third maybe fluttering, not
much wind, nose blowing, pollen, troll snot, roasted mutton, can’t see
the future, circles connected by blue lines, a map of time, rent a
cycle, the rent cycle, inescapable feudal poverty, sunglasses hanging by
an arm on a t-shirt neckline, a fluid natural gesture replicated
everywhere, I can’t do it, illiterate, deliberate, isolated, alienated,
puffy puke green coat rushing to avoid an omnibus, cheating? Reading
what is already written, typos allowed? Corrections? Revisions? Genius
never makes a mistake, which genius? Djinn? Let it (her?) speak through
the errors, blew an eyebrow hair off R, shake out the shoes, nice E, now
i7m behind, i seven am, 7AM, nice also at front, more mucus, love don’t
lrt me try, kind of magnet, more canes, only one, black, neighbours
leaves, raking? Breaking wind, stifled for now, WE, that is what
happens, checking again, n but why not? Next to the goat, a floater in
the moat, I’ve got more where that came from, perfectly placed short
snort, behind again, or not possible? Behinf what? New assembling, zip,
clinkle, noice eavsdrop, snort again now please, snort again now, whoop
whoop whoop, wooden legs heavy scrape the foolr, foolscape, any marks?
Check, jusasec... Nothing fake stone tile why all of the commas commies,
another nondescript with a mask, out the window, hand tired, recovering
from fall, release this mess? What mlhu! No nono! Cry cry pidgeons in
secerret hideouts between building, 5 dimensional coluor receptors, the
five skandhas according to haze, why get upset? Dude, slow waiting pace,
plaid scarf, back and forth, buzzer on wooden surface fart, red
bull hairy uniform junkie in sunglasses and another fucjing mask,,,
another tribe, reading glasses resting on the tip of a pink nose, long
white hairs surround a bald dome, another hage, hag on the fence’s edge,
tennis racket handle sticking out a the top of a backpack, sucum,
succour, find a sytyle, a hair crisis, drandruffy arroyo, quick exit,
slurp it back shove it in, another sits, jump a dog, a bundle of
flowers, 20 long years since Luang, sleeping tofddler in mother’s(?)
arms exit taxi, exueny, the high heel twirly locks set, generic hubcaps,
can’t afford to sleep, shoulder ache noew, old people everywhere, a
quartert baring int, trombones? No shamisen? Okinawa folk wood cane
waiting, a little hop a swaddle-de-daddle, Midnight as genius of course,
The Muse, Urania, The Cristian crisisian one, of astrology, no
astronomy, the stars, GOod Saturday, now down in Hell stealing the keys,
freeing those who wait, almost a glimpse down a..., should not have,
hanging from the tree, chocolates?fish tar, internal wandering begin not
begin, murmurmurmur, slapslap pittapitta sniff, janai, double
sunglasses lipstick, caps, hoods, small green plants clinging to the
corners, cough muted by an elbow pit, glasses perched on the patch
camera huge lensesss on gut, rs, rest, kekekekek, smirk at ? Point at?
Incapable of talk, fuzzy ones, sheepish, if you chose to die, concerning
the boundary, comma out right hand out, fuck a comma two crows nearly
in pigeon space, bruised spohie comma no why not earl gret egret regret
Tet white mouths elastic ears continue retinue; semi colon; half ;
comma:]3% kennedy was that? I was... Take your smokes off at the dor DOR
dearly and deadly orgone radishes, volume up gregariousness of the tung
tree Schtitt fell in love with a tree. So have i. Auto capital
correditect but only after perios perros and periods. Of war follwe
periods @ piece. Spaces also abritrarrry
freedukeyoudrewcineclub teoiouycget two light boxes of each pole,
disintegrating, shineforth, 45degreepointing tosidewalklenspointgoatee
gutsandsapporosondebenchtwoshare one can crackswhiskersfagreenplaschain
ban on backspace temp removed typooo gone muse finds another device
taking off coat best timecounting change glance asleep soundly on to p
of head cake eater movement of spoon to choco lips, lightsaber
orange/red shuffles over the lot just below vanished behind the wall,
risk a glimpse, lovely, purring slurps, cats have a rough tounge tree,
catch that or not? Snapping pen, now tuft hair has beer wife with rice
crackers? Ssss sounds, so nada, nanda, apologies for wiping, arrival,
out with the books, many archetypes, first pregnancy negative nancy
janai-oh! Yabai! Oh my! Itchy knee scabs, march the dangerous month,
over the handle bars just at the exact moment of a thought of home,
nemesis, hubris, green onions negi sticking out of mama bike basket, i’m
peeing!! The whistle is white. Changes the sound. Over a thousand of
nonsense now. Again bless yous. Covered baby head as bizarre
chest growth, blue band, crinkle shuffle, cookbook, late night drunk
Hamlet convo cat? No slightly goggle-eyed, baby you sacrifice, ankle
crack, placed helpless on the bench, confused or patient, directions,
routes of many colours, New york, a cane in both hands, more vertical
basket negi, private music, bag behind back, no clouds only a kite a
bird a hwak hawk i mean, objay still on bench commuter bike walked past
the ginkgo, got it! No red line, parents return, same sad slumping pose,
clop clop clop always look, the purpose? Small kid running with big
slab of circuitry, Honolua, grated manholes slippery when wet, real
release this? Old purple hair and slight smile, cup still empty, how can
they talk? Why can’t... Glowing 80s green, bobbing 5d p-picker struts
under the sign, read the last section, petering out, fuzzhead like S
spins the pole read then

Sunday, March 4, 2018

Our dreams are a second life. I have never been able to penetrate without a shudder those ivory or horned gates which separate us from the invisible world. The first moments of sleep are an image of death; a hazy torpor grips our thoughts and it becomes impossible for us to determine the exact instant when the "I," under another form, continues the task of existence. Little by little a vague underground cavern grows lighter... The spirit world opens before us.
-- Aurélia, Gérard de Nerval

Gilles Deleuze, in particular, had his own early but
explicit connections with the occult tradition, and this influence,
although suppressed by himself and his followers, can be traced
throughout the entire trajectory of his work. In an article entitled
“The Sonambulist and the Hermaphrodite: Deleuze and Johann de
Montereggio and Occultism,” Christian Kerslake tracks down the beginning
of this esoteric career. Kerslake’s essay begins:

One
of Gilles Deleuze's first articles, published in 1946, was an
introduction to a new French edition of an arcane work of philosophy
bearing the title Mathesis: or Studies on the Anarchy and Hierarchy of Knowledge,
by one Dr Johann Malfatti de Montereggio. Deleuze was twenty-one when
he published his introduction to the French edition of Malfatti's Mathesis,
which was the first new edition for a hundred years. "Mathesis, Science
and Philosophy" is one of a group of five texts he published in the
period 1945-7, and which he subsequently repudiated and omitted from
French bibliographies of his work.

And the heavily occult nature of Malfatti’s book is absolutely evident:

In Anarchy and Hierarchy
it is as if [German Romantic philosopher] Schelling's final theosophy
comes to completion in a hallucinatory Tantrism, in which the living
body of God, in its most complete self-development, itself appears in
hermaphroditic form in human sexuality, where the
coming-to-divine-consciousness becomes identical to the psychosexual
attainment, along Tantric lines, of spiritual "bisexuality". This
"system", uncovered by Malfatti, is said to form the basis for all
subsequent Eastern and Western esoteric thought, and now furnishes us
with the long-lost key to the ultimate system of medicine.

Not only, according to Joshua Ramey in The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy
and Spiritual Ordeal, did Deleuze write about the occult. He also
attended a salon at the residence of Marie-Madeleine Davy, “a scholar of
medieval philosophy and passionate spiritist,” in Paris where esoteric
ideas, among other radical subjects, were discussed by certain of the
glittering lights of French philosophy.

The
salons were the site of encounters between many leading French
intellectuals, such as Sartre and Bataille, as well as a very young
Gilles Deleuze.

The company also included a
number of French esotericists and devotees of occult philosophy, such as
Marcel Moré. Deleuze's work from this period reflects a profound
fascination with esoteric themes, inspired perhaps by Davy's own
conviction that a secret and subversive medieval tradition of
Neoplatonic thought contained a revolutionary gnosis waiting to be
rediscovered and redeployed in Europe.

Scrambling and Rambling

Kerslake argues, in his later Deleuze and the Unconscious, that well before such topics were quite openly explored
by D&G in the “Becoming Animal...” chapter/plateau (which Kerslake aptly calls “a late modern occult treatise”), they were
present in Deleuze’s Bergsonism. Kerslake quotes from near the close of
this text, which I’ll further condense here:

It
could be said that in man, and only in man, the actual becomes adequate
to the visual. It could be said that man is capable of rediscovering
all the levels, all the degrees of expansion (détente) and contraction
that coexist in the virtual Whole... Even in his dreams he rediscovers
or prepares matter. And durations that are inferior to him are still
internal to him... man is capable of scrambling the planes, of going
beyond his own plane as his own condition, in order finally to express
naturing Nature.

This power to retreat into the virtual and to "scramble the planes" is
potentially active in all humans by apparent virtue of their being
human, but in practice it is only available to the sorcerer-shaman, to
the artist-poet, to the master dreamer. In short, it is available to
those who have passed beyond the first gate.

Here the powers to
transform, to become other, to dissolve or shatter the one into the
many, to vary the speeds of existence, to travel instantly in time and
space, to expand and shrink the boundaries of the self, to superimpose
one place and moment upon others, are all at hand.

The Master of Animals
is there to freely present them to anyone who possesses the key and who
knows the proper rites and intonations. The mystic, or more accurately
the sorcerer who is unbound to theology and priestly tradition, is a
singularity, a cosmic anarchist:

He
or she is an unnatural figure, who no longer conforms to the
established laws of nature (that is, the laws of established nature). (Deleuze and the Unconscious)

The controller of dreams, the artist/magician who comes to realize that
the portals to the astral extension are present everywhere, who
discovers that in fact there is no separation between the astral and the
physical for one who holds the silver key, soon realizes that the
“laws” of nature do not apply.

The planes can be scrambled, the bounds
of the law can be endlessly stretched, forms can be altered, the only
imagined can be manifested in the light of day. Terence McKenna made
this exact realization in the confused and confusing wake of the
experiment at La Chorrera:

I
have come to believe that under certain conditions the manipulative
power of consciousness moves beyond the body and into the world. The
world then obeys the will of consciousness to the degree that the
inertia of pre-existing physical laws can be overcome. This inertia is
overcome by consciousness determining the outcome of the normally
random, micro-physical events. Over time the deflection of micro-events
from randomness is cumulative so that eventually the effects of such
deflections is to shift the course of events in larger physical systems
as well. Apparently, when wanting wishes to come true, patience is
everything. (True Hallucinations)

He goes on to explain that just as consciousness (in a way still unknown
to science) is able “to direct the electrical flow in the central
nervous system” of our bodies, given greater awareness it appears that
electrons and atoms beyond our mere physical boundaries can likewise be
manipulated.

Within shamanic states of consciousness, in other words,
our personal boundaries -- the area within our willed control -- can be
enlarged, can encompass more and more of the “outside” environment. And
for McKenna, as in many shamanic and mystical traditions, the means by
which consciousness can expand in this manner is through language.

The
sorcerer is revealed here as the original and ultimate poet. The
influence of Lovecraft on McKenna is obvious here, as Terence readily
admitted and Dennis concurred by affirming that the McKennas’
Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, also the name of Dennis’
autobiographical record of life with his brother, was taken directly
from Lovecraft.

As in a Lovecraft story, the shaman-sorcerer descends to a space where
words fail, where the senses themselves must open and widen in order to
comprehend anything at all. In these spaces or states, the sorcerer must
discover the words to convey his or her experiences to the community,
in song or in writing or in other creative work, or risk insular madness
or even physical death.

The sorcerer, as Kerslake reading Deleuze
points out, is “the only successful madman.” And there are many, mostly
unknown or forgotten or exiled, would-be sorcerers who have not
succeeded. The gate is easier to enter than it is to exit. Laws can
be stretched but often they do not contract to their usual and
comfortable limits.

Lovecraft’s horror stories are often about those who
fail to navigate the vast realm between the gates. And there are many
fates worse than physical death. Where many fail -- and especially many
moderns fail -- is in taking things too literally.

The Dissolving Borders of Self and Time

Hans Peter Duerr explains, in Dreamtime, that
whatever the shaman experiences it is a mistake to say that he or she
objectively becomes an animal. Instead, it is more accurate to suggest that
the dichotomies of objectivity and subjectivity, outer and inner, break
down at this point.

What actually takes place is not that the shaman turns into an
animal, but rather that he has now experienced his "wild", his "animal
aspect". Not until that happens will he be a true shaman. For he cannot know his human side until he also becomes aware of what it is not. To put it differently, he needs to become estranged from it, to have seen it, that is, to have seen it from the outside.
After experiencing that, he is no longer what he once was. In pictorial
representations, he now appears as a human bird or a human with bird's
legs.

The successful animal-becoming, therefore, is a human-becoming. The
werewolves and the vampires are those who do not return, the damned. A similar thing
happens with the related phenomenon of magical flight. It would not be
possible to say that the sorcerer or the witch flies like a bird, at
least as we perceive bird-flight with our modern everyday consciousness,
but a type of flight does occur.

It
not so much that we fly. What happens instead is that our ordinary "ego
boundaries" evaporate and so it is entirely possible that we suddenly encounter ourselves at places where our "everyday body", whose boundaries are no longer identical with our person, is not to be found.

The ego-defined boundaries of the self, which are identical to those
boundaries defined by our civilized culture, are at least temporarily
erased. The individual psyche and the collective psyche, known in the
past as the World Soul, temporarily become once again undivided.

And
this extension of the Earth, this astral plane, this psychic realm
between the material and the spiritual, between the gates, is precisely
the World Soul. The sudden erasure of boundaries can be experienced --
can be known -- as magical flight, as animal becoming, as telepathy or
telekinesis, as sexual and mystic ecstasy.

...a brujo need
not be able to fly like a bird in order to arrive at a different place
within seconds, for it seems that a sorcerer can change the boundaries
of his person so much that he can be simultaneously within his everyday
body and also at another place, where his body is not. Something
like that may indeed be happening during divination and telepathy, for
the people involved do not seem to overcome distances the way
electromagnetic waves do. It does not appear to be a transmission as
assumed by most parapsychologists. We are apparently dealing more with a
"lifting of boundaries", in which there is a dissolution of barriers
developed during the processes of civilization and individuation.

Yet it is not only the boundaries of the self that lift. Throughout
history and in many lands, those individuals and groups who have passed
beyond the first gate have entered into the timeless. Or, in other
words, beyond this point time is no longer experienced as mere duration, measured by clocks or the sun,
but is identified with eternity.

Across the world this breach into
eternity has been celebrated with processions and parades, with mad dance, with the
shattering of taboos, with the overturning of authority and the
inversion of social roles, with the expenditure and destruction of
property, with inebriation, with unbridled festivity, and with a riot of the
senses.

And, very understandably, it is the marginalized, the
oppressed, the outcasts and freeks who were mostly likely to jump into
the fray, to stomp most wildly in the thick of the hairy ruckus.

It
is easy to see how these "good witches", and also the werewolves or the
wild women of the Nomkubulwana, are related to those "great throngs of
women" who raged through the quiet of the night, the Couroi of Crete,
who danced over the meadows in the retinue of the Great Goddess, the
enraptured skin-clad maenads of the "Great Transformer", the nocturnal
hordes of the spirits of the dead of Artemis-Hecate, and the mad
"Bechler" women of the Slovenian Gail valley.

Witches, werewolves, maenads, spirits of the dead, the mad. With these
as the denizens of the midnight romps -- as in the cult of Cthulhu itself
-- it is easy to see how the existing authorities in the ancient and
medieval periods, and in “respectable” society in general, would attempt to
suppress or at least contain and rechannel these outbursts of truly
subversive energy. Festivals were therefore (mostly) permitted as useful
releases of steam, as acceptable (though temporary) penetrations of the
eternal.

No matter how
great the differences between these groups of people, they were all
united by the common theme that "outside of time" they lost their normal
everyday aspect and became beings of the "outer" reality, of the
beyond, whether they turned into animals or hybrid creatures or whether
they reversed their social roles. They might roam bodily through the
land or only "in spirit", in ecstasy, with or without hallucinogenic
drugs.

Mystery is for the Immature

With the onset of modernity, however, as more and more aspects of life
became colonized by the state and its micromanagement of the everyday,
the boundaries between time and eternity, between the real and the
imaginal, between the civilized and the wild, became thickened and more
rigid. The gates became harder and harder to find, and when they were
found and passed through there were fewer and fewer guides to point the
way home.

With the wilderness being increasingly cleared, with the
territory being mapped and over-mapped, with the monitoring and coding
and stratification of everything, what was once “outside” retreated to
the “inside.” Communal ecstasies and potlatches became something inward and
alienated, branded as sickness, antisocial. Psychiatrists became the
police of the psyche.

Unfortunately,
it happens many times that psychiatrists of this sort are people who
equate the boundaries drawn by modern civilization between itself and
the wilderness with a dividing line between reality and illusion. As far
as they are concerned, the reaches beyond that border are mere
"projections", and the dissolution of the boundary indicates mental
illness.

The boundaries of the consensus, of the narrow spectrum of thought
accepted by civilization, are identical to the boundaries of the real.
Everything outside of these bounds/binds is nonsense, insanity,
unhealthy, impure. Yet for those still blessed or cursed by dreams and visions
of landscapes and beings beyond the borders, nothing within them
will ever wholly satisfy.

Randolph Carter -- and likely Lovecraft, too,
despite his materialist claims -- was one of these few, and in The
Silver Key his melancholic disgust of the consensus is explained:

They
had chained him down to things that are, and had then explained the
workings of those things till mystery had gone out of the world. When he
complained, and longed to escape into twilight realms where magic
moulded all the little vivid fragments and prized associations of his
mind into vistas of breathless expectancy and unquenchable delight, they
turned him instead toward the new-found prodigies of science, bidding
him find wonder in the atom’s vortex and mystery in the sky’s
dimensions. And when he had failed to find these boons in things whose
laws are known and measurable, they told him he lacked imagination, and
was immature because he preferred dream-illusions to the illusions of
our physical creation.

The illusions of the physical are the only accepted illusions. Fantasy
can be explored in art, but only if this art is self-conscious of its
separation from the real and confines itself within the authorized mores
and tastes of society. All else is dismissed as romantic, foolish and/or
destructive escapism. Even children, increasingly, are denied to right
to imagine.

The eternal may have burst through in the past, or perhaps
will do so in the far distant future (but, the consensus bleats on, such
an event is very improbable as “natural laws” would be violated), but
it will not arrive today. The laws have been fixed. The gates are closed
and the keys have been lost.

No Place In Waking Life

All this indicates, even in the case of normally perceptive
scholars like Mircea Eliade, a total misunderstanding of where and when
this “dreamtime” is situated. As Duerr explains (quoting Eliade and
anthroplogists and psychoanalysts who hold a similar misconception):

The concept of "dreamtime" does not refer to any time in the distant past
to which the Australians supposedly think they can be "called up",
"repeated" or "emulated", which "endures" or proceeds "parallel" to
ordinary time, or which could be "projected" upon the present. The
"dreamtime" is not past, present or future time: it has no "location"
whatever on the continuum of time.

It, the extension, the astral, the dreamtime, the realm of becoming, the
World Soul, does not fall within time. It is both fully absent and,
potentially, fully present. It is both underworld and off-world, in the
unconscious and in super-consciousness. It “occupies” the space between
the rigid categories and typologies of our defined and preassigned
reality.

Kenneth Grant, in The Magical Revival, explains that this is also the
space of Lovecraft’s writing:

H.P.
Lovecraft, in one of his tales of terror, alludes to certain entities
which have their being "not in the spaces known to us, but between them. They walk calm and primal, of no dimensions, and to us unseen."

This was also the space that the McKenna brothers, by turning their organic
keys, blasted their way into in March of 1971. And in very similar
language to that used to describe what Carter beheld after stepping through the
first gate (“It is full of those paradoxes, contradictions, and
anomalies which have no place in waking life..”), Terence struggles to
make sense of what they had witnessed:

Our
collective intelligence was not compromised, but what was compromised
was the ability of reason to give a coherent account of what was going
on, as paradox, coincidence, and general synchronistic strangeness began
to increase exponentially. Into the vacuum left by the collapse of
reason rushed a staggering array of exotic intuitions about why things
were as they were.

Terence McKenna’s thought gets unfortunately pegged to his prediction of
the singularity or concrescence that would occur on December 21st of
2012. When this event failed to happen in an obvious and spectacular way (although I think
the jury is still out on whether something did begin to ripple into
manifestation at that time) his wider perspective has been largely
neglected.

The origins of 2012, though, were at La Chorrera. 2012, in a
very real sense, already took place then and there, and the date
essentially has become a symbol -- much like the Incarnation of Christ
-- of a singular event that could potentially happen at any “point”
within or between the space-time continuum.

Werewolves Become Vampires When They
Die

And there is the feeling,
reading these authors, that the space of the extension is really
coterminous with the world itself. Borrowing the terms of A Thousand
Plateaus, the becomings that characterize the entire plane of consistency
also move between the strata of the fixed and ordered. The plane of
consistency -- as well as all of the synonyms that D&G suggest for it,
including the Mechanosphere -- is yet another expression for the World
Soul.

Furthermore, if we
consider the plane of consistency we note that the most disparate of
things and signs move upon it: a semiotic fragment rubs shoulders with a
chemical interaction, an electron crashes into a language, a black hole
captures a genetic message, a crystallization produces a passion, the
wasp and the orchid cross a letter...

The
plane of consistency knows nothing of differences in level, orders of
magnitude, or distances. It knows nothing of the difference between the
artificial and the natural. It knows nothing of the distinction between
contents and expressions, or that between forms and formed substances; these things exist only by means of and in relation to the strata.

All of this at once reflects and is reflected by the various becomings
participated in by the sorcerer roaming in the wild:

Thus
packs, or multiplicities, continually transform themselves into each
other, cross over into each other. Werewolves become vampires when they
die. This is not surprising, since becoming and multiplicity are the
same thing... the Wolf-Man's pack of wolves also becomes a swarm of
bees, and a field of anuses, and a collection of small holes and tiny
ulcerations (the theme of contagion): all these heterogeneous elements
compose "the" multiplicity of symbiosis and becoming.

The world of the sorcerer, then, is precisely the physical world
apprehended through a wider range of perception, perception that has not
been blocked or limited by the various strata. The world is not wholly
transformed beyond the first gate, but our sense of it is entirely
changed. A new, in-between, realm opens up, one that has always been
there but has been little noticed. Henri Corbin, the French Islamic
scholar, locates this same understanding within esoteric Islam:

We
observe immediately that we are no longer reduced to the dilemma of
thought and extension, to the schema of a cosmology and a gnoseology
limited to the empirical world and the world of abstract understanding.
Between the two is placed an intermediate world, which our authors
designate as ‘alam al-mithal, the world of the Image, mundus imaginalis:
a world as ontologically real as the world of the senses and the world
of the intellect, a world that requires a faculty of perception
belonging to it, a faculty that is a cognitive function, a noetic value, as fully real as the faculties of sensory perception or intellectual intuition.

This
faculty is the imaginative power, the one we must avoid confusing with
the imagination that modern man identifies with “fantasy” and that,
according to him, produces only the “imaginary.” Here we are, then,
simultaneously at the heart of our research and of our problem of
terminology.

Yet another synonym is introduced, then, with Corbin: the mundus
imaginalis. This, being a “realm” between the empirical and the abstract
or spiritual, exactly describes the World Soul and Corbin explicitly
makes this identity. Corbin also provides the key to enter this
threshold realm: the imagination or the “imaginal.” And with this we are
right back at the start. “To think is always to follow the witch’s
flight,” as Deleuze put it in What is Philosophy?

Playing the Games of Satan

But words of caution are required. The astral or psychic realm that we’ve
entered into past the first gate is not the highest realm of the spirit.
Instead, it is a confusing place, a wonderful but often terrifying
place, a place full of angels and devils and all sorts of elementals,
nymphs, sprites and kobolds. It is very easy to get lost here forever.

The Traditionalist, René Guénon, who like Corbin became enamoured by
esoteric Islam, writes of the fatal confusion between the psychic and
the spiritual in his masterwork, The Reign of Quantity and the Sign of
the Times:

This
confusion moreover appears in two contrary forms: in the first, the
spiritual is brought down to the level of the psychic, and this is what
happens more particularly in the kind of psychological explanations
already referred to; in the second, the psychic is on the other hand
mistaken for the spiritual; of this the most popular example is
spiritualism, but the other more complex forms of “neo-spiritualism” all
proceed from the very same error.

And this error is especially evident within shamanism, especially modern
interpretations of “shamanism,” and its power-obsessed shadow, sorcery.

The
magical part of "shamanism" doubtless has a vitality of quite a
different order, and that is why it is something really to be feared in
more than one respect; for the practically constant contact with
inferior psychic forces is as dangerous as could be, first for the
"shaman" himself, as is to be expected, but also from another point of
view of a much less narrowly "localized" interest.

Guénon approaches this with the utmost seriousness and warns, almost
curses, those who would lead others down this false path:

It
is all too easy to see the gravity of the consequences of any such
state of affairs: anyone who propagates this confusion, whether
intentionally or otherwise and especially under present conditions, is
setting beings on the road to getting irremediably lost in the chaos of
the "intermediary world", and thereby, though often unconsciously,
playing the game of the "satanic" forces that rule over what has been
called the "counter-initiation".

The warning is stark and sobering. Nearly all of the figures mentioned
in these essays -- Lovecraft, McKenna, Deleuze and Guattari, Grant,
Duerr, etc. -- could be accused of propagating confusion according to Guénon’s
strict assessment.

All of the above are explorers of the “intermediary
world" and several, Grant certainly and possibly Deleuze and Lovecraft,
are associated with occult orders such as the Hermetic Order of the
Golden Dawn, etc.

These orders -- groups incidentally that Guénon was
also once an initiate of -- would be accused by Guénon and other
Traditionalists as being instruments of the “pseudo-initiation” or even the more openly subversive
“counter-initiation.” So how would the authors above defend themselves
against this damning criticism? Are they really Satanists?

In the case of Deleuze and Guattari, -- despite their fervent talk of the
demonic, of animal-becomings, of unnatural participations and nuptials,
and of scrambling the planes and flying with the witches -- their own
warning echoes throughout A Thousand Plateaus. It is perhaps most clearly
expressed in the final plateau:

Every
undertaking of destratification (for example, going beyond the
organism, plunging into a becoming) must therefore observe concrete
rules of extreme caution: a too-sudden destratification may be suicidal,
or turn cancerous. In other words, it will sometimes end in chaos, the
void and destruction, and sometimes lock us back into the strata, which
become more rigid still, losing their degrees of diversity,
differentiation, and mobility.

All of this is playing with fire, dancing with chaos. And the other
authors above all have their own warnings and cautions. But do these
excuse them from Guénon’s curse? Maybe not. Maybe they are all agents of
the counter-initiation and/or its more prosaic sub-organizations. This has
certainly been suggested widely of Terence McKenna in quite recent years.

But, beyond the
first gate, which our whole culture may be stepping through, who does
not escape suspicion? We are all transforming, churning, splitting,
melding, becoming. The Traditionists vs. the Perennialists vs. the Neo-Traditionalists. Guénon in the 1940s cautioned that there were no authentic and traditional orders of initiation remaining in the West. Could this also be true of the East today? And how would we know one way or the other?

The Traditionalists of the present may be as confused, as implicated,
as anyone else. Maybe they are also playing into an agenda that would prevent any rigorous exploration, any
unsanctioned expression, of the imagination at all? Or is this my own
satanic confusion and paranoia? The mundus imaginalis encompasses all of this.

To the Immediate

But
there still is hope of escape that does not lead back to the merely
material. The second gate! None of these authors stay anchored in the
astral. ‘Umr at-Tawil, the Master of Animals, leads us forward through
the shifting confusion and onward towards the ultimate gate beyond which
“all dimensions dissolve in the absolute.” We still hold the silver
key. Hyper-carbolation marches forth.

“I
am indeed that Most Ancient One,” said the Guide, “of whom you know. We
have awaited you—the Ancient Ones and I. You are welcome, even though
long delayed. You have the Key, and have unlocked the First Gate. Now
the Ultimate Gate is ready for your trial. If you fear, you need not
advance. You may still go back unharmed the way you came. But if you
choose to advance...”